The Signpost

Technology report

Git learning curve steep but not insurmountable, plus a diff style we can all agree on?

Developers bracing themselves for steep learning curve after Git move

There are alternative solutions, but none of them are viable without development work. Gerrit is viable right now, in its current state. Its downside is that its interface is slightly painful.

Every tool we use is going to have something we dislike about it interface-wise.

—Operations Engineer Ryan Lane describing new code review tool Gerrit

Discussion of the move to Git took on a more serious tone this week, focusing on ways in which the (particularly volunteer) developer community might be unprepared for the sheer scale of the change that lies ahead (wikitech-l mailing list). The long and detailed thread provided developers with a useful opportunity to ask detailed questions about the system coming into operation later in the month.

The difficulty, it seems, is that there is no easy option for developers: even casual contributors will have to get used to a completely different development workflow (incorporating a new process for committing and a new process for reviewing and commenting on other developers' code), not to mention a whole new vocabulary. Unpicking that steep learning curve and presenting it in "bitesize chunks" has proved tricky for the WMF team overseeing the move, given the amount of interdependence between a developer's command-line Git instance and the Wikimedia-side Gerrit review system with its much-critiqued user interface. On the plus side, numerous websites exist to help users unfamiliar with Git pick up not just the basics but also the more tricky syntax that developers will need to master if they are to contribute fully to MediaWiki after the March 28 transition.

Ultimately, few seem worried that developers will not be able to master the new system in good time, although, in the words of Diederik van Liere (currently a consultant at the WMF), "a new workflow requires new habits and that might take more time to develop". Among those effects with the potential to linger, the front-runner seems to be the (not yet fully understood) implications of the move on the historically pertinent volunteer-staff divide. Only time, it seems, will tell.

February Engineering Report published

WMF developers are currently working on a way to turn SMS messages (and their visually similar USSD counterparts) – the preserve of "chatty" conversations in the developed world – into an important link between the developing world and the sum of human knowledge.

The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for February 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. Ultimately, it was a month dominated by a handful of big projects, each of which have already been covered in the Signpost: the problematic Swift deployment, preparations for the move to Git, the 1.19 deployments (see release notes) and, to a lesser extent, progress with the Wikimedia Android app, which is now providing the foundation for a new Wikimedia iPhone app. As ever, however, the report provided details of many smaller projects that had received less of a spotlight.

One such project is the creation of a Wiktionary app by a team of Canadian students under the guidance of WMF staff developers. According to the report, the team is currently focusing on "targeting bugs, cleaning things up and improving usability in the v0.1 Alpha release". In similar news, there was also an update on efforts to make the MobileFrontend extension (which powers m.en.wikipedia.org and family) less WMF-centric, following a sharp critique of its shortcomings in January, as well as news that good progress is being made on a project to provide Wikipedia content via SMS/USSD, a major boost for mobile-only visitors on 2G connections (such as those found in parts of the developing world).

Elsewhere, the report noted the steps being taken to improve the number and depth of full site backups; two WMF locations now host copies of all Wikimedia dumps and two external mirrors are currently in the final stages of preparation. Finally, there was confirmation that a short period of slowness experienced on February 27 was in fact the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of unknown origin and motivation. The attack, which lasted only ten minutes, was brought to an end by the quick work of system administrators.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

15 BRfAs are open at the time of writing. Community input is encouraged.
The diff style provided for by the latest MediaWiki code, and hence set to go live within weeks

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-03-12/Technology_report